Jurors hear Savage's murder confession: 'It just kind of happened'

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TACOMA, Wash. -- For the first time, jurors heard a young man's tearful confession in the murder of a teenage girl on Puyallup's South Hill.

Tyler Savage's recorded confession refutes the defense claim that it was an accidental death during sex play gone bad.

The clean cut Savage that jurors are seeing in court is a far cry from the long-haired and bearded physical appearance he had three years when he admitted he to meeting up with16-year-old Kimmie Daily and killing her.

"She got up and started to go and I just choked her from behind," said a sobbing Savage on August 24, 2010.

That confession came just hours after Savage helped in the search for Daily. He later admitted to leading police in several wrong directions. That search ended when Detective Mark Merod lowered the boom.

"Told him that I knew that he had killed her and that we needed to do what was right," Merod said.

Merod testified on Wednesday that Savage slumped to the ground and then took them to where he'd dumped Daily's body.

"She died and I threw her in the sticker bushes, kind of afraid of what I did," Savage said in his confession.

He also admitted to staging the murder to make it look like a sex crime, "like someone just found her and raped her and I don't know, I was just panicking and I don't know, I just panicked," he said.

Savage's defense attorney, Les Tolzin, had told jurors he hopes to prove that Daily invited sexual contact and that the death was purely an accident during sex play gone bad.

The detective testified Savage never said anything like that to him. And despite the more than 40 minute confession, Savage never gave a clear reason why he did what he did.